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The Bengalis: a Thousand Years

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The Bengalis: a Thousand Years Bengalis Thousand Years 8670/ 021116 The BengAlis: A ThousAnd YeArs Jawhar Sircar The last few days of a century that also happen to be at the end of a whole millennium, are bound to stir a strange excitement in even the most placid person. The two most expected feelings that hold their sway can perhaps be summarized as: introspection and expectation — drawing a balance sheet of the past as also trying to gauge what the future holds. Such an exercise can cover not only a single person or his immediate concerns; it may as well cover his locality, his state or nation and may be stretched to entire humanity. The constraints of my acquaintance and knowledge hardly qualify me to scan any group higher or bigger than my own people: the Bengalis. Even in this, my limitations now plague me more than my enthusiasm to try out such a review — but these notwithstanding; the sheer thrill of initiating an animated adda on the subject overpowers me. At the beginning, let me make it clear that I do not have the audacity to try to cover a thousand years in just a few pages: hence I will concentrate only on certain significant periods or issues, for the sake of presenting a viewpoint. So let us begin: are the Bengalis a thousand years old? Or even more? Historians tell us about our history during the Pala- Sena period, which would give us about 1250 years to be proud of, but if we include the great Sasanka, we could be share-holders in a great concern that goes back fourteen centuries. But why stop there? Why not Vijay Singha and his conquest of Singhala, whenever it took place. After all, our school-teachers never tired of telling us about him. And if we study our archaeology a trifle carefully, we could always say that the chalcolithic users of Birbhaanpur and Pandurajar Dhibi were surely Bengalis. If we count the Palaeolithic inhabitants of Susunia and the numerous excavations of Bengal's lateritic western uplands as ‘ours’, it would give us a splendid history of five to six millenni if, of course, Published: http://jawharsircar.com/assets/pdf/The_Bengalis-A_thousand_years_Jawhar_Sircar.pdf Bengalis Thousand Years 8670/ 021116 we could just overlook the large gaps of unknown centuries in the intervening periods. Linguists and etymologists have pointed out that important Bengali words like langala, narikel, taambula (betel vine) and haridraa (turmeric), have Austric origins and hence we could claim direct ancestry from them. Maybe not, as the Austrics were too dark. Besides, have we not heard, ever since birth, that we are Aryans — even though most of us (please read the matrimonial columns) are just shyam-varna,a shade darker.Kabiguru took a swipe at this mindset when he wrote: ” MakhhaMullarbolechheAarjjyo, Tai shunemorachherechhiKarjyo” (We've stopped toiling, like 'natives'/ Now that Max Mueller has said/ That we're all Aryans pure.) To get back to seriousness, a good reply to the original question would perhaps depend on another question: what do you mean by Bengali? Let us not get into complications about 'Bengal' not existing as a unified geo-political entity till just a few centuries ago and let us presume that all the different names for the distinct parts of this ancient province — Pundrabardhan, Varendra, Rarh, Sumha, Vanga, Samatata, Harikela, etc., are deemed to be the 'Bengal' that we are discussing. Even so, we would require some acceptable criteria for determining the antiquity of the Bengalis. If our stress is on the Bengalis as a linguistic and cultural group, not just on the facts of geography or the needs of politics, then we have to exclude Sasanka or the Pala-Senarajas at least because they neither wrote in Bengali nor did they patronize or develop it. We do not know if they ever spoke in proto-Bengali. My submission is that the Bengali language, as we recognize it, developed from its infancy in the Pala-Sena period not because of the rulers but in spite of them.The common man, at least in the western rarh region, was perhaps conversing in a language that had a Bengali bias — as the Charyapads would reveal — but it was so full of other words that we cannot honestly call it Bengali. Though it is traditional to claim that the Charyapads are the beginning of Bengali literature — as they bestow upon us an antiquity of about Published: http://jawharsircar.com/assets/pdf/The_Bengalis-A_thousand_years_Jawhar_Sircar.pdf Bengalis Thousand Years 8670/ 021116 nine hundred or a thousand years —we must not forget that they had remained unknown to us till their momentous discovery in Nepal only a century ago. They can hardly be appropriated as Bengali, in spite of the distinct Bengali character in grammar, idiom and syntax. The Charyapads belong to the emerging new Indo-Aryan speeches, common to all the east-Indian languages — when Bengali had not yet blossomed out of Laukik-Avahatta, the proto-vernacular stage of Apabhrangsa. It is, therefore, safer to tread on firmer ground by concentrating on the earliest extant specimens of manuscripts and concrete historical evidence, when trying to fix the age of the Bengali people. Here, certain essential demarcations need to be made between terms like 'Bengal', the 'Bengali' script, the 'Bengali' language and the 'Bengali' people. Each of these has evolved over the centuries, sometimes separately and sometimes in unison, until all these identities appear to have coalesced into an integrated entity, sometime in the fourteenth century. Then, why talk about a thousand years? Because, as mentioned, the Bengalis as a distinct people, inhabiting a specific geographical area, communicating in the Bengali language and writing in the Bengali script did not appear on the scene all of a sudden — but took several centuries to develop. Other aspects of culture like dress, mannerisms, idioms, habits and diet also took centuries to reach the present stage — and are still changing with every generation — but clinging on to a common 'core', which is distinctively Bengali. The script, for instance, took almost fifteen centuries to firm up — from the Brahmi of Asokan inscriptions (third century BC), via the Dhanaidaha copper-plate inscription of Kumaragupta (432 AD), through the Khalimpur (late eighth century) and the Bangarh (late tenth century) grants of the Palas to reach what Dr.Sukumar Sen calls "the fully articulated Bengali alphabet" found in the Tarpandighi grant of Lakshmansen and in the late-twelfth or early- thirteenth century Cambridge Manuscripts of Yogaratnamala and Pancharakshaa. But all scholars are not willing to give such an old date. Dr.Suniti Kumar Chatterji felt that this "full articulation" of the alphabets took place only by the fifteenth century, not before. Dr. R.D. Banerji, also states that "the final development of certain letters, Published: http://jawharsircar.com/assets/pdf/The_Bengalis-A_thousand_years_Jawhar_Sircar.pdf Bengalis Thousand Years 8670/ 021116 such as i, ca and na are not noticeable until after the Muhammedan conquest." Historians have often taken a route different from that of the pundits of Bengali literature, by tracing the gradual evolution of language and script through the humble clay-tablets that the plebeians inscribed as vows (mannats) to god, if their simple desires were fulfilled. Professor Bratindra Nath Mukhopadhyay has brought out such a study of 'donative inscriptions' in Pratnasamiksha, depicting the common Bengali's quest in the first four centuries of the previous millennium to express himself:very significant, as it is the common man who contributed most to development of a distinct Bengali civilization. Scholars are vehement in their denunciation of "the shock of this conquest" as a "blow (which) stunted literature, prevented its growth" — until the Neo-Vaishnavism of Chaitanya came to the rescue. While the valuable contributions of the sixteenth century Gaudiya Vaishnava chroniclers, Govinda Das, Brindaban Das, Jayananda, Krisnadas Kaviraj and Lochan Das were indeed landmarks in Bengali literature (although individual excellence differed from kavi to kavi), would it really be fair to ignore all the preceding pathfinders? Among the latter, we have to start from the 1470s: Maladhar Basu's Srikrishnavijay and the Bengali Bhaagavat. Krittivas's Ramayan may have been written a few years later though some claim it may have been even earlier. Kabindra Parameswar's translation of a part of the Mahabharat may be placed around the turn of the sixteenth century. Though hundreds of scholars have fought it out, to place the Srikrishna Kirtan of Chandidas (Boru or Dwija) in every possible year of this period, we may go by the consensus that while the narration may belong to an earlier phase, the language possibly belongs to early sixteenth century. Does this indicate that Bengali literature is only a little more than five centuries old? Until we come across manuscripts in the Bengali script, expressing a language that can be termed as Bengali, belonging to a phase earlier than this, we have no way of proving that Bengali literature is very much older than the late-fifteenth century. The spoken word in every language precedes its literary form by one or more centuries, and therefore, one can safely place the construction of the Bengali identity, in really palpable terms, to the post-Charyapad, post-Sena period, possibly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Published: http://jawharsircar.com/assets/pdf/The_Bengalis-A_thousand_years_Jawhar_Sircar.pdf Bengalis Thousand Years 8670/ 021116 But are not the first three centuries after Islam entered Bengal in 1202-04 the 'dark centuries' as scholars have repeatedly told us? While it is true that we have no clear picture of the social and economic history of these three centuries, the political events are quite well documented — in fact better than ever before in Bengal's history.
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